If
you noticed that the last two Sunday mornings were slightly less
chaotic on the talk show circuit, that’s because Donald Trump broke with
his longstanding
TV tradition and did not appear. (He didn’t even call in.) For five
months running, Trump had been a fixture on the Sunday shows (he’s made 70 appearances since the beginning of 2015), spouting off endlessly and often creating controversy as producers watched their Trump-fueled ratings climb.
The
blueprint looked like this: Trump played the role of reality TV star
turned-carnival barker while the press cheered him on, feasting off the
clicks and audience surges he constantly delivered.
Missing for too long
from the equation? In-depth reporting and holding the blustery
candidate responsible for his often fact-free statements. “I don’t think
he’s been held accountable by the broadcast media for his erroneous
statements and repeated lies,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien tells me.
The author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald,
O’Brien gives the press a D- grade for its covering of Trump as a
presidential hopeful. He’s especially critical of cable news’ open-door
policy of Trump coverage, such as live, unfiltered broadcasts of his
rallies. “They give him the backyard to run around and then train their
cameras on him to see what happens,” says O’Brien.
But now, Trump
is taking a step back and turning down media invitations. He’s also
supposedly trying to roll out a new, more “presidential” image.
Will the press take the bait?
There’s no question that there’s been a makeover attempt within the Trump campaign in recent days. According to press reports, longtime political operative Paul Manafort has essentially taken over the
campaign. The move has been widely seen as an effort to tighten up the
operation. One key trait: pulling Trump out of the media spotlight where
he’s been living for the last nine months.
The campaign staff
shakeup and Trump’s absence from the Sunday shows “give the impression
that campaign veteran Manafort has taken the reigns and directed Trump
to scale back on some of the off-the-cuff behaviors that have gotten the
campaign negative coverage in the past,” wrote conservative blogger Larry O’Connor.
The
new-look Trump was unveiled Tuesday night after his New York primary
victory when he gave an unusually succinct victory address and avoided
his usual partisan insults.
Right on cue, political commentators swooned
over the costume change from Trump, giving him credit for not insulting
his opponents and (temporarily) dialing back the buffoonery.
“He actually called him Senator Cruz!” gushedABC World News Tonight’s David
Wright. “The consummate deal-maker changing his sales pitch to close
the deal. The tone, more presidential.” (Old habits apparently die hard — within a day, Trump was back to calling Cruz “Lyin’ Ted.”)
To repeat, the press gave Trump credit for not
brazenly insulting people during his victory speech.
And overnight, the
press is hyping as “presidential” a candidate who’s spent the last nine
months wallowing in campaign bigotry. Talk about a standard that’s been
invented out of whole cloth just for him.
Commentators might be
playing up the new, kinder and gentler Trump, “but where’s the evidence”
anything has changed, asks Trump biographer O’Brien. So far there is
none.
Meanwhile, note that candidates who try to unveil a new look
mid-campaign usually get called out by the media’s authenticity police.
But there’s been very little of that regarding Trump this week; very
little mocking of him for attempting to construct a new public persona
on the fly.
We’ll soon know for sure whether Trump has any plans to abandon
the thuggery that’s defined his campaign to date. But his absence from
the Sunday shows the past two weeks suggests the campaign may be trying
to throttle back his media availability to some extent. Instead of
dashing in front of television cameras, or speed dialing into news
programs, Trump has taken a step back, as witnessed by his recent Sunday
show hiatus.
In doubt is whether Trump’s
stepping back from his shiny-object media strategy, which the press
gladly supported since last summer. “Every time he needs to raise his
visibility, change the subject, or respond to an attack, he says
something outrageous and the cycle starts again,” wrote Joel Simon at the Columbia Journalism Review.
We’ve
seen the drill over and over. He insulted Mexicans! He insulted Sen.
John McCain! He insulted Megyn Kelly! He insulted Carly Fiorina! He
insulted the Pope! He insulted Ted Cruz’s wife!
Months of news cycles
have been robotically handed over to the Trump shiny-object coverage.
That
in turn has served as one of the media’s justifications for showering
Trump with unprecedented attention: They treat Trump differently because
Trump acts so differently!
Trump didn’t act like other
politicians, the press claimed. He wasn’t guarded in his comments. He
wasn’t surrounded by consultants. Trump was authentic and controversial.
Or so goes the argument.
And best of all, Trump gave lots and lots of
television interviews. His sound bites demanded unending press
attention.
In the unlikely event Trump actually manages to find a
softer, more “presidential” tone, and become slightly media shy, will
the press dial back its obsessive, celebrity-like coverage, and apply a more critical eye to his wild claims?
Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush."
Chris
Hayes talks with Sanders supporter Sen. Jeff Merkley and Clinton
supporter Sen. Sherrod Brown about the impact of the NY primary on the
Democratic race.
Oh, this is glorious. Ted Cruz sent a whiny email out to his
supporters about what a "sacrifice" he was making to run for President.
So Elizabeth Warren took him to task on her Facebook page, and boy did she spank him.
Yesterday, Ted Cruz sent a campaign fundraising email
whining about the “significant sacrifice” he’s made to run for
President. He whined about facing constant attacks, nonexistent family
time, his limited health and sleep, and having no personal time.
Are you kidding me? We’re supposed to pity him because trying to be
the leader of the free world is hard?! I’ve got two words for you, Ted:
Boo Hoo.
Know whose health is limited? Workers with no paid leave who can't
stay at home when they fall ill or have to care for sick kids. Know
whose sleep is limited? Working parents who do everything they can to
save money but stay up at night worrying about how do get their kids
through college without getting crushed by debt. Know who gets no
personal time? People who work two minimum wage jobs to support their
families. Know who gets no family time? Moms with unfair schedules who
drop their kids off at daycare and drive halfway across town only to
find their work hours have been cancelled.
And Ted Cruz? He opposes mandatory paid family and medical leave and
calls it "free stuff." He voted against student loan refinancing. He's
says the minimum wage is "bad policy" and he's done nothing to try and
help workers struggling with unfair work schedules.
And know who’s facing constant attacks, Ted? Hardworking American
immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks, women. They're facing the GOP's
constant attacks. They're facing YOUR constant attacks.
Working people are working more and getting paid less. They can't
save. Some face mistreatment and discrimination. They can't take time
off work for illnesses or to spend time with family. But they don't
whine. They don't throw tantrums or try to shut down their workplace
because they don't get their way - and then turn around and demand
promotions.
Senator
Cruz -- you chose to run for President. Working people don't get a
choice. Maybe you should spend less time complaining about your
"significant sacrifices" -- and more time trying to do something about
theirs.
In a perfect example of how disastrously run the New York primaries
have been, one voter is reporting that his name was deleted from the
list of eligible voters despite his registration six months ago. Why?
Because his name shares a few of the same letters as another man who
lives in a completely different borough.
Ben Gershman, a young voter from Chicago, registered at the New York
Department of Motor Vehicles after moving to Ridgewood in Queens six
months ago. But when he checked his voter status shortly before today’s
election, he found that his name had been taken off the voter list.
“They told me I shared the same initials as a voter in the Bronx, it
confused both registrations and I had become de-registered,” Gershman told DNAinfo New York.
Rather than helping Gershman fix this inexplicably frustrating
problem at the polls, he was forced to spend hours at the New York City
Board of Elections office on Queens Boulevard. Gershman said that by the
time he jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops and returned to his
poll site in Ridgewood, it took him a total of five and a half hours to
cast his ballot.
“It’s insane what I have to do, and I am registered,” he said. “There’s no accountability in the election process.”
In a Facebook post,
Gershwin urged other voters not to let the system defeat them: “NYC
Voters- DON’T settle for an Affidavit Ballot if you’ve been
deregistered! I went to the Queens County BOE and stood in front of a
judge who gave me a court order. It is your LEGAL RIGHT to vote on a
standard ballot. There’s already 126,000 voters confirmed to have been
deregistered– corrupt system, corrupt party, corrupt country!”
Rust is a popular first-person survival video game where
you start out completely naked, left to a barren environment to build
yourself tools, weapons, and a home as other players try to do the same —
and potentially try to kill you and steal your stuff. It's a tense
game, one in which your friends can suddenly turn against you and
basically ruin everything you worked for just for their own personal
gain.
But it's not the betrayal and tension that has gamers upset with Rust.
Instead, it's a new feature recently added to the game, which has
500,000 players each week, by developer Garry Newman:
Your character's
gender and race are now randomized. So even if you're a white man in
real life, you now may be forced to play a black woman.
Men, particularly white men, are not happy. Newman explained the situation in the Guardian, characterizing the reaction to the change as "extreme":
For race, this seems to be a regional thing. For example, most
complaints about being black in the game have generally been from
Russian players. With gender it seems to be more of a geography-free
complaint.
Here's one of the many messages we've received from disgruntled male
players: "Why won't you give the player base an option to choose their
gender? I just want to play the game and have a connection to the
character like most other games I play. Not have some political movement
shoved down my throat because you make the connection we can't choose
our gender in reality so let's make it like that in game too."
This is what women and minority gamers have been complaining about for decades
It's totally understandable that some people want to create their
characters as they see fit. As someone who enjoys playing role-playing
games, if I'm given the option I'll always create a character that I
think looks cool. So I can, to some extent, sympathize with this
sentiment.
Newman, for his part, says that he just didn't want to spend
development resources on a character building tool. And he also sees it
as valuable that people are forced to be of a certain race and gender
for their entire play-through: Players "should be recognizable
consistently and long-term — so anyone likely to commit a crime would be
more likely to wear a balaclava or a face mask," Newman wrote.
What's odd, instead, is that these same complaints from male, white
gamers would very likely fall on deaf ears if they were made by another
group — by, say, a black, Hispanic, or female gamer. After all,
originally, everyone on Rust was forced to play a bald white man — and there was no similar uproar.
Or worse, such complaints would fall on actively aggressive ears.
Consider Gamergate: The movement began in part as a response to
journalists trying to encourage more diversity in the gaming industry —
not just by opening the door to more women and minority developers, but
also making sure that games reflected the potentially diverse audience
playing them. This was widely perceived as such a vitriolic concept to a
large group of gamers that they rose up and harassed the journalists
and activists pushing for this increase in diversity, which Gamergaters
said was an attempt to ruin games with political correctness (which doesn't exist).
Given Gamergate, there's a bit of irony to the Rust controversy.
Take this feedback Newman received from one male gamer: "I just want
to play the game and have a connection to the character like most other
games I play." What this misses is that this male gamer is able to have a
connection to the character he plays in most video games because he's a man.
Meanwhile, minority and women gamers have for a long time just grown to
accept that they're probably going to be stuck playing white male
heroes if they pick up a mainstream triple-A game.
Newman made this point in his piece for the Guardian:
It's maybe understandable why some male gamers wouldn't want to play
as women. They're just not used to being forced to. You could probably
count on your fingers the number of major, big-budget games where you
have no choice but to play as a woman, never mind having no choice but
to play as a black woman. Female gamers are obviously more forgiving —
they've been playing games as men for most of their lives.
It's not that these gamers are wrong to be disappointed that they can no longer play as the character they would like in Rust.
I agree that character customization is great. The issue is that many
of the same people complaining now would probably be rolling their eyes
if a Hispanic man or black woman asked why they aren't well-represented
in Halo, Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid, The Witcher, The Legend of Zelda, or almost any other triple-A title that's come out over the years.
I'm not 100% certain that this is correct, but better safe than
sorry. We want to make sure that everybody has the chance the vote, so
spread the word.
EDIT: this has been confirmed by a couple of people in the comments. Here is a link more information:
Googled, this is from the New York Civil Liberties Union in 2010:
Can I wear a political t-shirt or button to the polls? The answer to
this question has not been clearly resolved. But to be safe and avoid
problems, we recommend that you wear a coat over your t-shirt and put
political buttons in your pocket while at your polling place.
Saudis warn US that it will sell off
hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the
kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the its government to
be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks.
The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s
passage and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense
discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the
State Department and the Pentagon, CNN reports. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.
Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s
message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling
lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion
in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they
could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.
Several outside economists are skeptical that the Saudis will follow
through, saying that such a sell-off would be difficult to execute and
would end up crippling the kingdom’s economy. But the threat is another
sign of the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United
States.
The administration, which argues that the legislation would put
Americans at legal risk overseas, has been lobbying so intently against
the bill that some lawmakers and families of Sept. 11 victims are
infuriated, The Nation noted.
In their view, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the
kingdom and has thwarted their efforts to learn what they believe to be
the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist
plot.
“It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis
over its own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the
World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and who is part of a group of victims’
family members pushing for the legislation.
President Obama will arrive in Riyadh on Wednesday for meetings with
King Salman and other Saudi officials. It is unclear whether the dispute
over the Sept. 11 legislation will be on the agenda for the talks.
Saudi officials have long denied that the kingdom had any role in the
Sept. 11 plot, and the 9/11 Commission found “no evidence that the
Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials
individually funded the organization.” But critics have noted that the
commission’s narrow wording left open the possibility that less senior
officials or parts of the Saudi government could have played a role.
Suspicions have lingered, partly because of the conclusions of a 2002
congressional inquiry into the attacks that cited some evidence that
Saudi officials living in the United States at the time had a hand in
the plot, the New York Daily News reported.
Those conclusions, contained in 28 pages of the report, still have not been released publicly.
The dispute comes as bipartisan criticism is growing in Congress
about Washington’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, for decades a crucial
American ally in the Middle East and half of a partnership that once
received little scrutiny from lawmakers. Last week, two senators
introduced a resolution that would put restrictions on American arms
sales to Saudi Arabia, which have expanded during the Obama
administration.
Families of the Sept. 11 victims have used the courts to try to hold
members of the Saudi royal family, Saudi banks and charities liable
because of what the plaintiffs charged was Saudi financial support for
terrorism. These efforts have largely been stymied, in part because of a
1976 law that gives foreign nations some immunity from lawsuits in
American courts.
The Christian Broadcasting Network said
the Senate bill is intended to make clear that the immunity given to
foreign nations under the law should not apply in cases where nations
are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill Americans on United
States soil. If the bill were to pass both houses of Congress and be
signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi
government to be examined in the Sept. 11 lawsuits.
Yesterday, the Rude Pundit was talking to a millennial dude who will be
voting in his first presidential election this year. He sure hates
Donald Trump, but he doesn't like Hillary Clinton because "she's so
shady." That's one of those things that trigger a gut-level reaction in
the Rude Pundit because it's a belief that's based on a heaping mountain
of horseshit. So he went off on the millennial.
"No," the Rude Pundit snapped, "that's completely fucking wrong. The
only reason you think Clinton is shady is because 25 years of
conservative media shoved it down your throat. She's been accused and
accused and investigated and investigated and guess what? Not a goddamn
thing has ever come of it. It's all shit made up to damage her. If you
keep saying over and over that someone did something wrong, did
something wrong, did something wrong, but you never prove it, then
you're just an asshole."
As Henry Louis Gates more politely put it in the New Yorker,
"For all we know, Hillary Clinton may be guilty of everything she’s
accused of and more. You might say the point is that we don’t know.
And
it’s in those dark gaps in our knowledge that the political unconscious
makes itself felt: you can’t tell a gun from a cigarette by the smoke
alone. Which inference you prefer depends on which story you
prefer—assuming you’ve been given one."
By the way, Gates wrote that twenty fucking years ago.
The article is titled "Hating Hillary," and it's fascinating to reread
it now in the context of an election in the middle of our third decade
of thinking that Clinton must be dirty from some scandal and worthy of
hate.
And this is not about her donors or her paid speeches or whatever,
although the way we think about those things are colored by one of the
most successful right-wing smear campaigns ever. No, this is the Hillary
Scandal Industrial Complex, the nexus of
Filegate-Whitewater-Travelgate-Benghazi-EmailServerGate and more, all
fantasies conjured by conservatives in order to punish her for the sin
of being a First Lady who tried to get health care reform passed and
didn't shut the fuck up and order drapes for the president's bedroom.
You think that's oversimplifying it? Then you didn't fucking live
through it in the 1990s. You didn't watch as men in both parties tore
themselves to pieces over what they viewed as Clinton's lack of decorum,
her failure to merely be an adornment for her husband (see the reaction
to Eleanor Roosevelt for this level of intense hatred).
The scorn that
Michelle Obama gets for just saying that American fat fucks should
exercise a little and stop eating piles of shit is horrible, and its
racist elements are disgusting, but, to be sure, it doesn't come near
the level of Hillary Clinton because no one could write an article
titled "Hating Michelle" and have it be about anything more than a bunch
of cranky yahoos.
Clinton herself in 1996 offered a prescient explanation of the why she
was a target for such animosity: "I believe that we’re going through a
significant transition—economically, politically, culturally, socially,
in gender relations, all kinds of ways—and so someone as visible as I am
is going to get a lot of attention. I think if the spotlight were
turned on many of my friends in their own private lives somebody could
make out of it what they would: ‘My goodness, she didn’t take her
husband’s name,’ or ‘She’s the one who travels while her husband stays
home and takes care of the children,’ or ‘She has a very traditional
role—does that mean that she’s sold out her education?’ There could be
questions like that raised about nearly every American woman I know."
What pissed people off about Clinton is something that still pisses them
off. Sometimes, she just sickens of all the bullshit and she lets you
know. In the early 1990's, when it was still unusual to see a male
candidate's wife as anything other than supportive arm candy, Clinton
wasn't afraid to step in it, like with her famous remark about working
instead of staying home and baking chocolate chip cookies (which led to
the degrading act of publishing her cookie recipe to show sexist
traditionalists that they needn't be scared of the big, bad lawyer
lady).
The Rude Pundit has one other theory for why conservatives have kept up
their hatred of Clinton. See, when Bill's affairs started to be known
beyond Arkansas, during the 1992 campaign, she famously stuck by him.
That enraged the right because they hoped the feminist governor's wife
would dump him and do in Clinton's pursuit of the White House. The fact
that she never threw Bill under the bus when, really, who could have
blamed her, undid damage to Bill every time a new sex scandal erupted.
So it exacerbated their hatred because the right could never bring
Hillary Clinton to heel, even when they thought her own beliefs would
make her do what they wanted.
You have to understand that history in order to understand Clinton. Read the Gates article.
It's all there, twenty years ago: her hatred of the press, the small
circle of confidantes, the warmth that people say she has on a personal
level, all the accusations of Machiavellian manipulation, and,
especially, the so-called scandals that never became scandals.
"So," the Rude Pundit said to the millennial, "it's just being dumb and
ill-informed to not vote for Hillary because of fake scandals. However,
there are lots of reasons not to vote for her that have nothing to do
with that."
Back in the dark ages of the 1990's, a certain hysteria was sweeping the
land. Pre-Internet, before your children could watch people slice off
parts of themselves and have sex with them on YouTube, some parents'
groups were falling on their fainting couches over violence and a little
bit of sex in video games. This came after the fainting over dirty
words in songs. When she was First Lady, and running for Senate from New
York, Hillary Clinton took up the cause of stopping the kiddies from
seeing digital breasts and blood.
In December 1999, campaigning
in more conservative areas of Long Island, Clinton spoke out against
the manufacturers of video games and called for uniform ratings across
media, hinting that if it wasn't done voluntarily, she would introduce
legislation for that if she became senator. She talked about visiting a
video arcade: "It's a very revealing and sobering experience." As for
games at home, "I couldn't help but be upset when I read about the two
boys from Columbine being obsessed with the game Doom."
Her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, using a report
from the Federal Trade Commission that said that media companies,
including video game makers, targeted young people in their advertising
of content with violence, went out on the campaign trail with Hillary
Clinton in September of 2000:
"President Clinton, making a rare
appearance with Hillary Rodham Clinton to support her Senate candidacy
in New York at the Jewish Community Center in New Rochelle, condemned
the abuses cited in the report. The Clintons suggested they would
support government restraints if the industry did not curb advertising
aimed at underage audiences."
While a senator in 2005, Hillary Clinton became outraged because the 2004 game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has a mini-game involving "graphic" sex. This is known as the "Hot Coffee"
mod to the game, and if a badly-animated cartoon guy nailing a cartoon
woman is your thing, you can watch videos of it. Clinton asked the FTC
to investigate
Rockstar games to see if this was intentional (it was), saying, "I hear
from parents all the time about the frustration they feel as they try
to pass their own values onto their children in a world where this type
of material is readily accessible."
In a statement on her formal letter to the FTC, Clinton went further:
"The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is
stealing the innocence of our children and it’s making the difficult job
of being a parent even harder...I am announcing these measures today
because I believe that the ability of our children to access
pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for
adults is spiraling out of control."
The measures she was calling for included legislation to "prohibit the
sale of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors and put in
place a $5000 penalty for those who violate the law." In December 2005,
along with Senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, Clinton announced
she was sponsoring a bill, the Family Entertainment Protection Act,
that included the fine and community service to the on-site manager of
any business that sold or rented "a Mature, Adults-Only, or Ratings
Pending game to a person who is younger than seventeen." It also imposed
ratings system oversight so that the government could judge whether or
not games were being marked "Adults-Only" correctly.
The bill failed to even make it out of committee, thanks to pressure
from the video game industry, as well as free speech advocates who
called it government censorship. Oh, and the fact that any of the
connections that Clinton was making between violence and video games was
utter nonsense.
The point here is not that Hillary Clinton attacked video games,
although if the Rude Pundit were a gamer, it would give him pause. The
reason for bringing this up deserves some context, especially for the
kids reading this blog, and it connects very clearly with the 1994 crime
bill that has gotten so much attention lately.
And that, sweet readers, is for Part 3.
Last night's debate in Brooklyn was utterly and completely useless. It
told us nothing new, and no one stumbled bad enough or soared high
enough to make a difference. The Democratic audience was as boorish and
annoying as any Republican debate crowd. When the 1994 crime bill was
brought up, Hillary Clinton was asked if it was a mistake that she
supported it (she was First Lady and could not vote on it) while Bernie
Sanders was never fully asked about the fact that he really, actually
voted for it. The bill didn't become law because Hillary Clinton
advocated for it. It became law because members of Congress voted for it
and the president signed it. So, really, the effects of the bill are
more on Sanders than on Clinton. She is not completely innocent here,
but a little perspective is always necessary.
But the crime bill is an interesting case. Because, see, it is of a
piece of a kind of liberal self-loathing that started under Reagan and
didn't end until Barack Obama was elected. Oh, gather round, dear
millennials, come over to the campfire and listen to the Rude Pundit
spin a tale or two.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the worst thing a politician
could be called was "liberal." Saint Ronnie Reagan made liberalism into
the enemy of real America, and the people bought
into it. "Liberal Democrats" became a pejorative, used any time any
Democrat proposed anything that smacked of government interference in
"freedom," which is defined as "shit conservatives like." It worked so
well that many Democrats began running away from liberalism for fear
that they might be tarred with the foul epithet. That's how we got the
sight of Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor
Michael Dukakis riding around in a goddamned tank in the 1988 election.
You don't want to appear like a punk-ass, bleeding heart liberal? Show
how tough you are. Go shoot some shit up.
For Democrats, defensiveness about liberalism became the default
setting. Sure, sure, your Ted Kennedy or your Barbara Mikulski could get
away with being openly left-wing. But, especially if you wanted a
national profile, you had to hedge on your ideology and demonstrate that
you could be as tough and mean and violent as a Republican. And that
meant you had to do some things that showed that brute strength and also
showed that you weren't beholden to liberal interests. Remember, too,
that we were still in thrall to the Cold War mentality, so "liberal" equaled "commie" to many people.
After 12 years of Reagan and Bush, Sr., Bill Clinton was elected
president. Now Clinton was always aware of the need to not seem too
liberal, as his near-psychotic support
for capital punishment showed. Clinton's presidency was marked by what
has been praised as his "triangulation" on Republican issues, especially
when he had to deal with a Republican-led Congress for most of his
terms. That meant that he would take up a conservative goal, like
welfare reform, and make it his own, adding in a few progressive elements
here and there. You could call it "compromise," if you like, except
compromise usually entails a more even split in what each side gets.
Otherwise, it's just "surrender." Many of us called it "abandonment."
(The Rude Pundit stood in a voting booth in a church in Indiana in 1996
for several minutes, wondering if he could pull the lever for Clinton
because of welfare reform. He did, for the sake of Supreme Court
nominees, always the endgame of any discussion on whether or not to
vote. Of course, Clinton didn't get a chance to nominate anyone in his
second term.)
What does this have to do with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders? In the first part
of this series, the Rude Pundit dismissed outright the various made-up
scandals that have given Clinton this undeserved aura of shadiness. That
just doesn't fucking matter because it's all lies with a good
publicist. And there is no reason in the world to give a frantic rodent
fuck about what she did or didn't say in her speeches to Goldman Sachs.
It's another fake-out that Sanders is annoyingly using to dent Clinton.
And, at this point, how many fucking politicians aren't beholden to one
well-funded group or another? If Hillary does Wall Street's bidding,
Sanders has certainly backed off anything radical against the NRA.
The second part
of this series looked at Clinton's blatant exploitation of unwarranted
fears of the effects of violence and sex in video games. And that's
where the rubber hits the road for this blogging voter. It's not because
of video games, per se, but it's because, like her husband and like so
many Democrats before and even now, she chose to demonstrate that she
has conservative street-cred in the most convenient of situations.
This is where her support for the 1994 crime bill comes into play. She
chose to become a strong advocate for it because she and Bill were using
the threat of gangs, crack, and super-predators to show that they can
be tough and right-wing, too (and were unafraid of offending African
Americans). It's there in her 2002 speech supporting
the Iraq war. She said, "In the four years since the inspectors left,
intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his
chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability,
and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary
to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no
evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11,
2001." She was almost totally wrong, except for the 9/11 stuff. But it
sure sounded hawkish as hell.
The Rude Pundit's discomfort with Hillary Clinton is not because she's
flip-flopped on some things. It's not because she's got skeletons in her
closet. Christ, Clinton's closet is must be swept clean at this point.
No, it's the political expediency that bugs the shit out of him. It's
the selling out of liberal goals in order to appeal to people who
wouldn't vote for her anyways.
And you can argue that Clinton has done so very much for women and for
the dispossessed around the world. You can do that, quite successfully.
But then someone could easily counter that Clinton's vote in support of
the Iraq war undid a huge amount of the good she has done. It's that
inability to connect women's rights and human rights to the cataclysm of
the wars and conflicts she advocates for, that great harm has been done
to families because of the 1994 crime bill she supported. That balance
sheet, finally, is the reason the Rude Pundit can't support her in the
primary.
(Obligatory note: Yes, he will support her in the general if she's the
nominee because the Rude Pundit isn't a self-righteous prick.)
Numerous New York voters took to social media to vent about changes to
their voter registrations that will bar them from voting in the state's
primary on Tuesday.
More than 200 outraged New York voters have joined a lawsuit claiming
the party affiliation on their voter registration changed without their
consent. The voters say they are unfairly being shut out of Tuesday’s
primary.
The suit, to be filed Monday in Brooklyn, calls for New York to be an
open primary state, allowing anyone to vote in primaries regardless of
party affiliation.
“For many of our complainants, to have the electoral process deprived
of them, it’s devastating,” Shyla Nelson, an activist and spokeswoman
for Election Justice U.S.A., told the Daily News.
New York is one of 11 states that has a closed primary system and, due
to an obscure election law, voters must have been registered by November
of the previous year for the party whose primary they plan to vote in —
this is the earliest change-of-party deadline in the country.
“If the primary were open, this would be a non-issue for thousands of
registered voters that have had this happen to them,” Nelson said. “By
making the primary open, it eliminates one of the most vexing problems
New Yorkers have dealt with in this primary season.
“It’s a threat to the democratic process,” he added
The closed primary system is intended to prevent “party raiding,” when
voters switch parties en masse to influence their rival party’s primary.
But the extra restrictions and early deadlines can leave some people
out, even the children of GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s, who won’t be
voting in the Republican primary because of what they called an “onerous” process.
Numerous voters involved in the suit claim they looked up their voter
registrations after the deadline passed to find that their party
affiliation had changed from Democratic or Republican to “Not
affiliated” or “Independent,” a switch that will bar them from voting in
either primary.
Joanna Viscuso, 19, from Seaford, L.I., said she registered to vote as a
Democrat during her college orientation at Adelphi University in 2014.
She noticed earlier this week that now her voter registration online says she is “not affiliated” with a party.
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
The Bernie Sanders campaign has publicly criticized the closed primary
system because it will exclude many of his supporters from voting for
him.
She called Nassau Board of Elections and they told her that she had
filled out a form in September change her party affiliation and sent it
in October, but she claims she never did that. She’d be a first-time
voter.
“As soon as I noticed it was changed I was infuriated and then when
they said there was nothing I could do I was still infuriated,” she
said. “All of a sudden we can't vote? That’s ridiculous!”
Fabrizio Milito, another voter who signed up with the suit, registered
as a Democrat in 2009 and voted in local elections as recent as last
year.
The 25 year old construction worker from Bayville, L.I., noticed his registration now says “not affiliated.”
“I got really upset and I went to call them (the Nassau board of
elections) and even the guy on the phone was pretty baffled,” Melito
said. “He told me I must have changed it but I never did.”
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
Most
of the voters who joined the lawsuit originally registered as Democrats
and now claim that their party affiliation has changed.
Some voters involved in the lawsuit — who are primarily Democratic —
also claim they their voter registration had been canceled altogether.
“The integrity of the election process is vital to democracy,” fumed
Cliff Arnebeck, an Ohio-based attorney involved with Election Justice
U.S.A. who has litigated against election fraud since 2000.
Requests for comment from the New York State Board of Elections were not immediately returned.
In the Empire State, the Bernie Sanders campaign has publicly slammed
the closed primary policy saying it shuts out independent voters and
young voters, two groups that would tend to vote for the
socialist-leaning candidate.
“We have a system here in New York where independents can’t get
involved in the Democratic primary, where young people who have not
previously registered and want to register today can’t do it,” Sanders
said during a rally Wednesday night in Washington Square Park in
Manhattan.
General election polls almost always show Bernie Sanders beating all
three of the remaining Republican candidates by very large margins. Fox
News’s own polling shows the same. Bill O’Reilly can’t believe his lying
eyes.
Cenk Uygur, John Iadarola (ThinkTank), and Jayar Jackson, hosts
of The Young Turks, break it down.
"Bill O’Reilly was rather astonished by the results of Fox News’ own poll tonight and said he just bluntly doesn’t believe them.
Not
the whole thing, mind you, just the part of the new poll showing that
Bernie Sanders beatsJohn Kasich by 4 points, Ted Cruz by 12, and Donald
Trump by 14.
O’Reilly was just incredibly floored and asked both
Dana Perino and Geraldo Rivera if they believe those numbers. Rivera
called it “pie in the sky.”
“I don’t believe it,” O’Reilly said.
“And I have to say, with all due respect––the Fox News poll has been
good––I don’t believe this. I just don’t.””
I converted a lot of mods every single mod to .pak so its
super easy to install; you dont need to extract the .pak or use any
program, just copypaste the mod into a folder. It took me a loooot of
time, but hopefully it worth it.
Installation
Go to Steam\steamapps\common\StreetFighterV\StreetFighterV\Content\Paks\ and create a folder named ~mods (the ~ is important)
Download this,
extract, and paste those two files into that folder (this is a one-time
thing, you don't need to do it everytime you install a new mod)
Put the mod you downloaded inside that folder
To remove the mod just delete the .pak file inside ~mods or
you can rename the file and remove the .pak extension at the end in
case you want to keep the mod to use it later, just don't touch the
'ModReady' files, those files are there to avoid issues when using
certain mods standalone. More info about this here
EDIT: Now you can also use this tool made by kardus to manage your .pak mods. You can enable/disable all of them with one click and more good stuff, so check it out.
A Moscow court this week convicted and sentenced seven hackers for breaking into countless online bank accounts — including “Paunch,” the nickname used by the author of the infamous “Blackhole”
exploit kit. Once an extremely popular crimeware-as-a-service
offering, Blackhole was for several years responsible for a large
percentage of malware infections and stolen banking credentials, and
likely contributed to tens of millions of dollars stolen from small to
mid-sized businesses over several years.
Fedotov, the convicted creator of the Blackhole Exploit Kit, stands in front of his Porche Cayenne in an undated photo.
According to Russia’s ITAR-TASS news network, Dmitry “Paunch” Fedotov
was sentenced on April 12 to seven years in a Russian penal colony. In
October 2013, the then 27-year-old Fedotov was arrested along with an
entire team of other cybercriminals who worked to sell, develop and
profit from Blackhole.
According to Russian security firm Group-IB,
Paunch had more than 1,000 customers and was earning $50,000 per month
from his illegal activity. The image above shows Paunch standing in
front of his personal car, a Porsche Cayenne.
First spotted in 2010, BlackHole
is commercial crimeware designed to be stitched into hacked or
malicious sites and exploit a variety of Web-browser vulnerabilities for
the purposes of installing malware of the customer’s choosing.
The price of renting the kit ran from $500 to $700 each month. For an extra $50 a month, Paunch also rented customers “crypting” services; cryptors are designed to obfuscate malicious software so that it remains undetectable by antivirus software.
Paunch worked with several other cybercriminals to purchase new
exploits and security vulnerabilities that could be rolled into
Blackhole and help increase the success of the software. He eventually
sought to buy the exploits from other cybercrooks directly to fund a
pricier ($10,000/month) and more exclusive exploit pack called “Cool Exploit Kit.”
The main page of the Blackhole exploit kit Web interface.
Not long after that story, the individual with whom Paunch worked to
purchase those exclusive exploits — a miscreant who uses the nickname “J.P. Morgan” — posted a message to the Darkode[dot]com crime forum, stating that he was doubling his exploit-buying budget to $200,000.
In October 2013, shortly after news of Paunch’s arrest leaked to the
media, J.P. Morgan posted to Darkode again, this time more than doubling
his previous budget — to $450,000.
“Dear ladies and gentlemen! In light of recent events, we look to
build a new exploit kit framework. We have budgeted $450,000 to buy
vulnerabilities of a browser and its plugins, which will be used only by
us afterwards! ”
J.P. Morgan alludes to his former partner’s arrest, and ups his monthly exploit buying budget to $450,000.
The Russian Interior Ministry (MVD) estimates that Paunch and his
gang earned more than 70 million rubles, or roughly USD $2.3 million.
But this estimate is misleading because Blackhole was used as a means to
perpetrate a vast array of cybercrimes. I would argue that Blackhole
was perhaps the most important driving force behind an explosion of
cyber fraud over the past three years. A majority of Paunch’s customers
were using the kit to grow botnets powered by Zeus and Citadel, banking
Trojans that are typically used in cyberheists targeting consumers and small businesses.
For more about Paunch, check out Who is Paunch?,
a profile I ran in 2013 shortly after Fedotov’s arrest that
examines some of the clues that connected his online criminal persona
with his personal social networking profiles.
It’s been a year since Senator Bernie Sanders announced his plan to seek the 2016 democratic presidential nomination. That means that for 12 months, Bernie’s popular ideals have been scaring the living hell out of the democratic establishment. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this.
Since Bernie Sanders extended his winning streak to seven out of the last eight states on Tuesday with a decisive victory in Wisconsin, the race has quickly turned into a grudge match reminiscent of the 2008 contest between current frontrunner Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama. Presidential qualifications have been debated, tragedies have been politicized, and loyalties have been questioned. Indeed, Clinton has become increasingly vocal about Sanders’ apparent lack of devotion to the Democratic Party.
“He’s a relatively new Democrat,” said Clinton in an interview with Politico magazine on Wednesday. “I’m not even sure he is one. He’s running as one. So I don’t know quite how to characterize him. I’ll leave that to him. But I know there’s a big difference between Democrats and Republicans, and I know that Senator Sanders spends a lot of time attacking my husband, attacking President Obama, you know, calling President Obama weak and disappointing, and actually making a move in 2012 to recruit somebody to run a primary against him. I rarely hear him say anything negative about George W. Bush, who I think wrecked our economy, just not to put too fine a point on it.”
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Late Friday night and into Saturday morning, Young Turks host Cenk Uygur
live-streamed an altercation at an American Airlines boarding gate in
Los Angeles over a flight that was delayed 4 hours, leading the host to
be kicked off the flight before he even took a seat.
On Twitter, Uygur posted: “Management at @AmericanAir just kicked
me off a flight to Miami because I complained the flight was delayed
for 4 hours. Never got on plane.” https://twitter.com/cenkuygur/status/718729740924940288
He later added: “If you book a flight with @AmericanAir they will
ruin your day, ruin your plans and then rob you. They say they won’t
give me my money back.”
In a video he uploaded, he and other passengers can be heard angrily
arguing with boarding agents over the fact that no plane was available
after a 4 hour delay. Uygur can be heard repeatedly asking, “Who
made the decision that we weren’t ever going to get a plane,” after
accusing America Air supervisors of “thinking this is funny.”
According Uygur, he was told “the Captain didn’t feel comfortable” with him on the plane.
Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri)
